Let’s play jury for a moment, eh? Tell me, what should be done with a wayward Catholic bishop who, in an address to a gathering of self-identified Jewish leaders, twisted the words of St. Paul to the Romans – “God’s gifts are irrevocable” – in support of the following claim:
And is this Old Covenant dead and buried? Neither the written word of the Old Covenant, nor the written word of the New, would dare allow us to say that.
Now, bear in mind, this was well before conciliar Rome ever produced a despicable document by a similar name: The Gifts and the Calling of God are Irrevocable. More on it later.
That clarified, what if this same man publicly insisted:
In a synagogue, God is worshipped, by rites, by a reading, by a law, which God himself gave.
And then, practically mocking the words of St. Paul, “For if justice be by the law, then Christ died in vain,” he went on to say to his Jewish admirers:
We are God’s people, and not two different people. I will be your God, and you will be my people. This is a vocation. It’s this covenant that makes us unique.
Get that? “Us!” This bishop speaks as if faithful Catholics and faithless Jews are one and the same in the eyes of God. Indicting himself further still, if you can imagine such a thing, he goes on:
As I see it, the Jews and the Christians both have vocations from God … we are a covenanted people.
Again, what should be done with such a bishop?
Oh, by the way, he was in seminary during the reign of Pope Benedict XV and was consecrated a bishop more than fifteen years before the controversial Novus Ordo rite of episcopal consecration ever came into being; well before the Council, in fact.
So, tell me, what in justice should be done with this guy? How should his trail of offenses against the faith be treated? What should his sentence be?
We know how the Holy Roman Catholic Church has historically set about addressing such matters:
During his lifetime, he most certainly would have been summoned to Rome and called to account by the Holy Office; his public presentations and his writings would have been scrutinized and censured as necessary, and he would have been called to reaffirm the true faith as stated so plainly by Pope Pius XII as follows:
By the death of our Redeemer, the New Testament took the place of the Old Law which had been abolished … on the gibbet of His death Jesus made void the Law with its decrees fastened the handwriting of the Old Testament to the Cross, establishing the New Testament in His blood shed for the whole human race. (cf Mystici Corporis 29)
In contrast to the bishop’s claim that in a synagogue, God is worshipped, by rites, by a reading, by a law, as if the rites of the one true Church of Christ differ from those of the synagogue only in form, this bishop would have made to either explicitly confirm or deny his belief in the following:
Says St. Leo the Great, speaking of the Cross of our Lord, “was there effected a transfer from the Law to the Gospel, from the Synagogue to the Church, from the many sacrifices to one Victim, that, as Our Lord expired, that mystical veil which shut off the innermost part of the temple and its sacred secret was rent violently from top to bottom.” (ibid.)
In like fashion would this renegade cleric have been confronted with the very words of Our Lord Himself:
He that despiseth me despiseth him that sent me. (Luke 10:16)
For good measure, one can also imagine the Holy Office cautioning the wayward bishop to remain ever mindful of the decrees of the Council of Trent which taught:
All men had lost their innocence in the prevarication of Adam – having become unclean … and under the power of the devil and of death … but not even the Jews by the very letter itself of the law of Moses, were able to be liberated, or to arise, therefrom. (cf Decree on Justification, Chapter I)
If anyone saith, that these said sacraments of the New Law do not differ from the sacraments of the Old Law, save that the ceremonies are different, and different the outward rites; let him be anathema. (Decree on the Sacraments, Canon II)
Unfortunately, unto the deception of many in our day, that Church (the true Church) is largely overshadowed by a counterfeit church, the one presently in occupation of the Vatican, an insidious institution that has even gone so far as to steal the holy Catholic name.
Rather than taking steps to protect the innocent souls that this bishop might otherwise deceive, this false church is actually making plans to honor him!
On September 24, 2026, the bishop under discussion, Fulton J. Sheen, will be “beatified” in preparation for the day when he will inevitably receive the counterfeit church’s Conciliar Lifetime Achievement Award for Service to the Revolution, a Temu version of Catholic canonization.
The above-mentioned quotes were taken from a speech given by Sheen on February 22, 1967, at Temple B’rith Kodesh in Rochester, NY.
At the event, Sheen’s friend, Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum, who was the Interreligious Affairs Director for the American Jewish Committee (AJC), praised Sheen, thanking him “for his leadership at Vatican Council II in support of the historic declarations on Religious Liberty and on Jewish-Christian Relations.”
NB: Sheen didn’t soften his views on the Synagogue in light of the Council, rather, the Council moved toward him, inviting exactly the sort of indifferent attitude toward the Jews that Sheen had long since embodied.
In a recent article about Sheen, the Irish Times reported:
In 1934, he joined the National Conference of Christians and Jews (NCCJ), and was later ecognized as an “outstanding protector of human rights” from the New York Chapter of B’nai B’rith.
Regarding the work of the NCCJ as told in the New Catholic Encyclopedia:
Some members of the Catholic hierarchy, particularly Archbishop John T. McNicholas of Cincinnati, remained reticent [about NCCJ] during the 1930s and 1940s, following an interpretation of a letter of Pope Leo XIII that held that intercredal cooperation was a form of syncretism or religious indifferentism.
Thirty years after joining NCCJ, Sheen proved Archbishop McNicholas’ reservations well-founded.
We have addressed Sheen’s unfittingness for actual canonization in this space a number of times in the past, (see HERE and HERE ) demonstrating that it is precisely due to his broad based fidelity to the Council, as opposed to constancy in the true faith, that the counterfeit church is compelled to honor him.
That, needless to say, is so for nearly every post-conciliar so-called “Saint.”
In the case of Fulton Sheen, however, I would submit that there is a more specific and lesser known impetus at play, namely, his over-the-top esteem for our Lord’s enemies, aka the Jews.
For example, in addition to the quotes already offered, Sheen once told his Life is Worth Living audience:
If the old Israel would reject Him (Christ), He would not eventually reject Israel … We, the new people of God, are only a branch that is grafted on to the tree; we are not the root, Israel is the root.
Curiously missing from this dubious paraphrasing of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans is the following regarding the unbelieving Jews, the “natural branches” as St. Paul calls them:
Because of unbelief they were broken off. But thou standest by faith. Be not highminded, but fear. For if God hath not spared the natural branches, fear lest perhaps also he spare not thee. See then the goodness and the severity of God: towards them indeed that are fallen, the severity; but towards thee, the goodness of God, if thou abide in goodness. Otherwise thou also shalt be cut off. And they also, if they abide not still in unbelief, shall be grafted in: for God is able to graft them in again. (Romans 11:20-23)
As Sheen would have his naïve listeners (and present day fans) believe, St. Paul was sadly mistaken, the “natural branches” were not cut off by their unbelief, rather, they remain ever attached to the tree of everlasting life, drawing divine nourishment from its roots, despite having rejected Christ, the true vine.
In a certain sense, we might consider Sheen the father of the aforementioned DDF document, The Gifts and the Calling of God are Irrevocable wherein it is said: ““The Jews are not excluded from God’s salvation because they do not believe in Jesus Christ.”
But wait, there’s more.
Recall Sheen’s close personal friend Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum of the American Jewish Committee (AJC), and how the rabbi praised his Catholic confrere, thanking him “for his leadership at Vatican Council II” in support of two of the most controversial documents it produced, Dignitatis Humanae and Nostra Aetate.
That’s rather a curious statement given the fact, as stated in a recent article by Massimo Faggioli:
Bishop Sheen participated in Vatican II but spoke only once at the council and left no significant trace in the conciliar corpus.
With this in mind, one might assume that Tanenbaum, perhaps moved by affection for his friend, was exaggerating Sheen’s role at the Council, in particular as it concerns the matters of religious liberty and the Church’s relationship with the Jews. That interpretation, however, is incorrect. Rather, it appears that Tanenbaum knew more about Sheen’s actual influence on Vatican II than even the other Council Fathers.
While the full extent to which Fulton Sheen influenced the outcome at Vatican II remains unknown, there is reason to believe that he was active behind the scenes, quietly operating on behalf of the American Jewish Committee, the best known member of which insofar as it concerns the Council was its theological advisor, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. (See HERE for more on Heschel’s role in the drafting of Nostra Aetate.)
A tribute to Rabbi Tanenbaum published by Notre Dame de Sion (which is dedicated to Jewish-Christian dialogue) reads:
Rabbi Tanenbaum threw himself into the American Jewish Committee’s initiative on behalf of what eventually emerged from the Second Vatican Council as Nostra Aetate. He supervised an active program that included three AJC memoranda sent to Cardinal Augustine Bea, documenting the negative and hostile portrayal of Jews and Judaism in Catholic textbooks, noting anti-Jewish elements in the liturgy, and the last (written by Heschel), suggesting concrete steps that the Church could take to redress past injustices … One of the crowning moments of his professional life was that he was present when the Council Fathers voted to adopt Nostra Aetate after many delays and some watering down of the original text.
From the statement above, a surprising truth (to me, anyway) emerges. While Rabbi Heschel was indeed the point man and the face of AJC’s efforts to pressure the Church into adopting a conciliatory attitude toward the Jews, the lesser-known supervisor of that “active program” was none other than Fulton Sheen’s longtime friend, Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum.
This being so, it only stands to reason that Tanenbaum and the AJC would seek to leverage their cordial relationship with America’s most popular prelate, Fulton Sheen, in order to help grease the skids, so to speak. Well, there is good reason to believe that this indeed was the case.
Preserved in the Marc H. Tanenbaum Collection of the American Jewish Archives is a letter from AJC’s Chief Executive Officer, John Slawson, addressed to Jacob Blaustein, an American industrialist and former President of AJC, in preparation for his upcoming meeting with Bishop Sheen. The date, March of 1964, in the lead up to the Third Session of Vatican Council II wherein the draft text of what was to become Nostra Aetate would be vigorously debated. It reads in part:
During this interim period between April and the reconvening of the third session in September, we feel it is important that the positive attitude of the American bishops be communicated in an effective way to the Jewish people…. If Archbishop Sheen feels so inclined to make a declaration of his personal position in support of chapter 4, the American Jewish Committee would be prepared to communicate his views in an effective way to the Jewish leaders and people here and abroad.
There can be no doubt that among the “people abroad” to whom the encouragement of America’s most famous bishop would be communicated was Cardinal Augustin Bea, dear friend of Rabbi Heschel.
All of this said, it makes all the more sense that the counterfeit church should honor (more appropriately, dishonor) Fulton J. Sheen with a mock beatification. After all, the Council was heavily influenced by the Synagogue, and the church that emerged therefrom remains squarely under its thumb today.
NOTE: Tickets are still available for Thursday’s big event. Visit TicketMaster to secure your seats today! No, really. They’re selling tickets. This calls to mind the common Jewish practice of selling tickets for seats in the synagogue for the “High Holy Days,” with the elite naturally occupying the rows closest to the front. (You can’t make this stuff up.)
